I havent tested any of the 6900 series, but 7000 series do not work. I believe GTX 580 and HD5870 to be the fastest that work. For AGP it is the HD3850 followed by the HD4670. The HD4670 might be faster when AA/AF is applied in certain situations.

HD 3850 will always have better AA performance simply because of more ROP's (16 vs. 8 ) and more VRAM bandwidth available (256-bit vs. 128-bit). I seriously doubt there are tweaks in 4670, that can overcome combined performance advantage of those two key factors in Anti Aliasing (even if GPU itself is clocked a good bit higher on 4670).

4670 will be better in AF, true (if it has enough bandwidth to feed TMU's).

EDIT: "@vetz 4760 ?I think you meant 4670 ?"Nvm, was fixed

Last edited by agent_x007 on 2017-3-30 @ 10:22, edited 4 times in total.

vetz wrote:I havent tested any of the 6900 series, but 7000 series do not work. I believe GTX 580 and HD5870 to be the fastest that work. For AGP it is the HD3850 followed by the HD4760. The HD4760 might be faster when AA/AF is applied in certain situations.

vetz wrote:I havent tested any of the 6900 series, but 7000 series do not work. I believe GTX 580 and HD5870 to be the fastest that work. For AGP it is the HD3850 followed by the HD4760. The HD4760 might be faster when AA/AF is applied in certain situations.

it seems like Radeon PCI-e 2.1 cards do work, as all cards from the 5000 series on are 2.1 cards, maybe even some 8000 and 9000 series cards work. Nvidia didn't make any 2.1 cards, they went straight from 2.0 to 3.0

"All, I just installed a Powercolor dual fan 1GB variant of the Radeon HD 6950 and it is running fine on my Asrock 4coredual-sata2 r2.0 with the 2.20A BIOS, an Intel E5700 Pentium Dual Core overclocked to 3.6Ghz, 2x2GB Patriot DDR2-800 5,5,5,15 running at DDR2-640 4,4,4,12, Creative Sound Blaster Live PCI sound card, a Seagate 1TB 7200RPM HD, and a Viewsonic P225F with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. I picked this up at Newegg for $70.00, with a $20 rebate and an instant $10 Newegg card. I have a Rosewill 530W single rail 12V 41amp PS. There should be no issue as far as power is concerned. Unfortunately, I had to give up my IDE ports on the motherboard for my DVD-ROM/Writer drive due to the 10.83" length of this card. It is absolutely huge. I almost never use a ROM drive anyway. Just an FYI.

Update, I was able to connect a PATA DVD/RW drive with a standard ribbon cable to the motherboard with no clearance issues with the card. I was using one of those SATA/PATA-IDE adapters plugged into the motherboard and a SATA DVD/RW drive. It was way too tall to fit under the card. The ribbon cable just fits.

I also was able to swap out the 1GB card with a Sapphire 2GB HD 6950. It powers down to 250 core 150 memory and runs much cooler than the Powercolor product that stays at 450 core and 1250 memory (I believe) for some reason. There is a 12 degree difference delta between these cards because of this. The Sapphire card is idling at 32C with 30% fan, whereas the Powercolor is idling at 44C at 30% fan. I will fiddle more with the Powercolor card to see if I can get it cooler. I am using MSI Afterburner for both cards with a custom fan setup."

"The 6870 is a PCIE 2.1 card and that works on my 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0 board.I'm not sure if masterofunivers is running the last bios update from PC Treiber, that may have provided support for PCIE 2.1?"

"Thanks for that info Masterofunivers.I followed your instructions and it all worked out well, I got AMD 4770 card drivers installed and the kids are playing their favourite games again on this 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0 rig with Windows 10 64bit. I also tried out my other card AMD 6870, it worked OK also on this motherboard with Win 10 64bit.Cheers"

If so, HD 3850 will always have better AA performance simply because of more ROP's (16 vs. and more VRAM bandwidth available (256-bit vs. 128-bit). I seriously doubt there are tweaks in 4670, that can overcome combined performance advantage of those two key factors in Anti Aliasing (even if GPU itself is clocked a good bit higher on 4670).

4670 will be better in AF, true (if it has enough bandwidth to feed TMU's).

I always get confused by these model numbers- 4000 series should always be better/faster than 3000 series but it's not always the case

I wish these manufacturers abandoned this numbering system and just divided up the cards into "lite" mainstream" and "performance" so it would be easier to figure out which card is faster than what.

Based on what I've read certain Radeon PCI-e 2.1 cards work and certain ones don't- namely, 5000 and 6000 series cards should work and anything from 7000 series and above won't.

GTX 590 is on about the same level as the Radeon 6990, and these are the two top cards for these motherboards.

A-L-E-X wrote:Based on what I've read certain Radeon PCI-e 2.1 cards work and certain ones don't- namely, 5000 and 6000 series cards should work and anything from 7000 series and above won't.

GTX 590 is on about the same level as the Radeon 6990, and these are the two top cards for these motherboards.

Didn't read this topic close enough :

vetz wrote:As written in first post, no luck for me with dual GPU cards: "I've also tested dual GPU cards, the HD4870x2 and the GTX295, none works"

Based on the above^, both GTX 590 and 6990 probably won't work either.My 7900 GX2 works fine

PS. Pretty sure charts on Tom's hardware were made for PCI-e versions of DX10 and later cards (unless stated otherwise).+ It's VERY general view of tiers, with newer driver releases (and new games), some cards may jump up/down on tiers.

A-L-E-X wrote:Based on what I've read certain Radeon PCI-e 2.1 cards work and certain ones don't- namely, 5000 and 6000 series cards should work and anything from 7000 series and above won't.

GTX 590 is on about the same level as the Radeon 6990, and these are the two top cards for these motherboards.

Didn't read this topic close enough :

vetz wrote:As written in first post, no luck for me with dual GPU cards: "I've also tested dual GPU cards, the HD4870x2 and the GTX295, none works"

Based on the above^, both GTX 590 and 6990 probably won't work either.My 7900 GX2 works fine

PS. Pretty sure charts on Tom's hardware were made for PCI-e versions of DX10 and later cards (unless stated otherwise).+ It's VERY general view of tiers, with newer driver releases (and new games), some cards may jump up/down on tiers.

I remember reading somewhere that some dual GPU cards work and others don't.

Best cards we have confirmation for are the GTX 580 and HD 6950 so far. The HD 6870 also works so the HD 6970 also probably works.

One interesting thing that I noted was how far above the GT 730 64 bit 2 GB GDDR5 card was (on the same level as the 8800 GTX) from the GT 730 4 GB DDR3 card. Even though it's $10 cheaper and has half the VRAM . That GDDR5 memory and 384 cores over the 96 cores of the DDR3 card must help a lot- but it only has one DVI port.

With these boards is there a way to run two DVI monitors even if a card only has one DVI port? I was thinking of having a card in the AGP slot too, that way you could run two DVI monitors from two different video cards. How would you be able to monitor them (GPU temps, frame rates, VRAM usage, etc.)?

Also what you mentioned earlier about the GPU getting stressed at high temps when it's under close to full load- can the temp of that (the VRM) also be monitored? Or should the regular GPU temp be used for that? According to EVGA anything over 100C is too high.

So I just got my 775Dual VSTA in the mail and I couldn't boot to Windows or install Windows for that matter until I dropped all the possible setting in BIOS relating to voltage and Mhz. I suspect it's either my power supply (7-ish year old 350w power supply) or bad caps on the motherboard.

Checked with a P4i65GV and everything ran normal. Could be due to the lower voltage requirements but I'm not certain.

This is making me quite sad

EDIT

The processor I've got is an E2160, rated at 1.8Ghz. The max stable frequency I can run it at is 1.45Ghz. Otherwise my system reboots under load. I suspect there's not enough power going to the Vcore.

I'll give an update when my new PSU arrives. Also, I've got a Q6600 coming as well so we'll see how that goes!

But on another note, I've realized just how much my 7600 GS was being bottlenecked by that AGI port on my P4i65GV. It's night and day!

Question- is there a reason a 2 TB USB external hard drive wouldn't work with this system? I tried to plug in my new WD into the USB 2 port and it doesn't recognize it I also tried to plug it into my Win 7 laptop and it wouldn't work there either. It says in the specs this drive doesn't need an external power source but could that be the reason it isn't working? Maybe the USB 2 port doesn't give it enough power?

So I got my replacement 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboard. This one does switch on with the P4 connector connected, however it's just the fan going 100%, no video output. Sometimes it switches itself off after 10 seconds, but mostly just keeps running with no output.

I have tried this with different Ram, PSU, Video cards, Cpus, inside and outside a case, checked for shorts. The only thing that is the same is the CPU fan. Which doesn't appear to be shorting anywhere.

I get no beeps from the system speaker I installed. Seems like electrically it is there, but nothing home. I have tried the jumper settings and removed Bios battery.

So anyone got any ideas? I cant believe the 2nd mobo in a row wont work for me.

agent x007 there is an annoying problem on the 4coredual-sata2 mainboard which affects all unofficial bios: the system has troubles when bank interleave is configured to 8-way and 2DIMMs DDR2 supporting 8-way are used; so it could happen that the system hangs since the beginning, or that the system starts the first time but booting again it the POST shows wrong memory data in single channel and memory value (11964MB) So I assume that the modded bios of 4coredual-sata2 has some wrong editing. If I set one only dimm the system recognize 8-way bank interleave with the official bios, while 4-way with the unofficial bios. The 8-way bank interleave can increase the memory bandwidth up to 420MB/s making the system much more responsive. Is there a way to fix this drawback?

Azrael wrote:agent x007 there is an annoying problem on the 4coredual-sata2 mainboard which affects all unofficial bios: the system has troubles when bank interleave is configured to 8-way and 2DIMMs DDR2 supporting 8-way are used; so it could happen that the system hangs since the beginning, or that the system starts the first time but booting again it the POST shows wrong memory data in single channel and memory value (11964MB) So I assume that the modded bios of 4coredual-sata2 has some wrong editing. If I set one only dimm the system recognize 8-way bank interleave with the official bios, while 4-way with the unofficial bios. The 8-way bank interleave can increase the memory bandwidth up to 420MB/s making the system much more responsive. Is there a way to fix this drawback?